These Are the Spring Season’s Must-See Museum Shows
- El Museo Del Barrio
- Through August 3, 2025
Puerto Rican-American artist Candida Alvarez is having her moment with a major mid-career survey at El Museo del Barrio that traces her continuously evolving five-decade practice and inquiry. For years, Alvarez has defied the conventional boundaries between abstraction and figuration, treating her work as both a projection of selfhood and a reflection of the collective body, interlaced through a system of dynamic, often complementary relations. Shaped by an endlessly resourceful impulse toward experimentation, her art is vivid and multilayered, anchored in personal and shared memory as she weaves cultural influences with meditations on embodiment and the slippages of lived experience. Over time, her chameleonic compositions have become increasingly abstract, yet remain charged with emotional resonance and autobiographical depth, unfolding as mutable midscapes of memory, migration, identity and place. The survey coincides with an exhibition at GRAY gallery, which compellingly pairs Alvarez’s work with the bold, chromatic narratives of Bob Thompson. Together, the two shows illuminate her sustained, fertile dialogue with the entire history of art and visual communication, as she subverts the canons of traditional painting, overcoming the binary of figuration and abstraction to freely deploy color and form as storytelling agents.
